Reading non-literacy in the contemporary novel

This thesis investigates the representation of non-literacy in contemporary British and US fiction written after the late 1980s. I use the term ‘non-literacy’, rather than the value-laden ‘illiteracy’, to refer to fictional characters who do not possess the technical ability to read or write, but do engage in alternative kinds of knowledge production and reading. My principal argument is that non-literate narrative perspectives are able to bring into focus, and displace, literacy’s hegemonic status by defamiliarising ‘literate’ ways of knowing, reading, and seeing. In foregrounding the often overlooked perspectives of non-literate characters, throughout this work I offer a sustained critique of the assumption that literacy provides an unbiased access to knowledge and power. I ask, what kinds of access to power does literacy enable? And, how is that power challenged or reinforced by certain literary texts?

The texts I explore in this thesis are: Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), and Ali Smith’s Like (1997). The chapters of this work show how the alterity, and imaginative potential, of non-literate characters are staged through key textual moments of encounter between readers and non-readers. In Chapter One, I explore how Waters mobilises the romantic and sexual encounters between the literate and non-literate protagonists to imagine a suppressed lesbian sexual history of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two argues that Morrison, in Beloved, resuscitates a residual orality still latent within the written word, merging oral narration with the written form of the novel to imaginatively recount buried histories of ordinary free(d), enslaved, and formerly enslaved African Americans. Chapter Three turns to Vuong’s On Earth. I investigate the failures of the novel’s epistolary narrative and its problematic politics of translation, through which Vuong attempts to render the cross-cultural and linguistic conflict between the literate and non-literate protagonists. In Chapter Four, I explore the representation of what I term a ‘post-literate’ condition in Smith’s Like.